Discussion Forum

I have just completed readingNialle Kishtainy 2017. A Little History of Economics. Yale University Press 249 pages.which is an excellent tour through the many schools and theories that have emerged in economics over the last few centuries. It is a…Continue

Coming towards the end of "GRIT: why passion and resilience are the secrets to success" by Angela Duckworth. I love that we now have research and populist books in Positive Psychology and I have enjoyed Marty Seligman's books. Psychology research…Continue

I have just completed reading Of Human Bondage, volume I, by Somerset Maugham. It was published in 1915 and is the story - probably substantially autobiographical - of a young man growing up and having great difficulty finding direction in life. I…Continue

Last night I read a chunk of the novel The Asiatics, by Frederick Prokosch. I say "a chunk", because my copy is missing the first fifty pages or so, so I was plunged into the middle of the action, at which point out hero was already locked up in a…Continue

This little book explores mercy in humorous and insightful ways. Lamott shares her stories as illustrative of our bombu natures with honesty and humor. What I found particularly interesting is that she is Christian, but has what I consider a…Continue

I am currently reading this work, translated by Cathy Porter, published in London by Alma Books. This paperback edition was published in 2010.I am finding it more interesting than I expected. You can imagine the dynamics of the Tolstoy household. He…Continue

Iris Murdoch, 1978. The Sea, The Sea. Panther. Fiction. 502 pages. Winner of the Booker Prize. Last night I started reading The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch. This is the third or fourth of her novels that I have read - maybe the fifth. They are each…Continue

While science and Buddhism have had many places of accord this seems a very new place for science based enquiry to engage with consciousness; let alone the experience of death. I am quite elated to see this as it will open new pathways to those many people who shun religion for the more 'reality' based critical sort of enquiry that science is regarded as premised upon. Many paths.

Robert McCarthy thank you. I read a bit of Neuroscience and have noted none of the authors use the word Consciousness. Good to know there are areas of science interested in exploring how our perceptions weave with what we believe is "out there." Robert, do any of these authors mention the unconscious?

Thanks, Robert. Very interesting. Of course, science is having its say but these are not new ideas - not to Buddhists anyway :-) . And also 'of course' we are bound to ask "How can it be like that?" - a real mind teaser.

I have been very much drawn to reading and attending conferences around recent understandings of science in relation to consciousness and notiobs of other power. I am currently a third of the way through a recent book ' Beyond Biocentrism' br David Lanza. While the language is not so technical the current understandings are deeply challenging to our lived notions of reality. Here are a few paragraphs that illustrate where science is looking.
Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we—consciousness, the mind—create space and time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. This consciousness is co-relative with objects in that space-time realm. The conclusion seems inescapable. Suffusing the cosmos is the realm of mind, whose observations cause objects to materialize, to assume one property or another, or to jump from one position to another without passing through any intervening space. These results have been described as beyond logical comprehension. But these are real experiments that have been carried out so many times that no physicist questions them. As Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics . . . Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” But biocentrism makes sense of it all for the first time, because the mind is not secondary to a material universe. Rather, it is one with it. We are more than our individual bodies, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.

Robert - yes, i think that this is an important and dreadful matter. The tools evolved to make a liberal society super comfortable can also be the means of total oppression so it is possible that we are walking like blind children into a caldron of misery waiting somewhere in the future. The road to hell is paved with such intentions and collectively we cooperate in creating the conditions for our own destruction.

I am reading a book..."against the fascist creep" by Akexander Reid Ross. It studies this subject from its earliest named time around the beginning if the 20th century right through to Trump and Brexit.
The author holds me in domething of a grim spell as I finish the chapters up to the late 1940s. It is hard to accept the power of a full on fascist government with todays technology very much including mass media.
I was going to write a review of an earlier book I read but felt I could not do it justice and instead quoted paragraphs on facebook.

Born: September 13, 1919, London, United KingdomDied: October 10, 2018

Mary was a dear friend and inspiration. I first met her when she came to a meditation class I was leading. Her husband had recently died and she was grieving. She did not need meditation, she just needed to grieve and that be OK, which it definitely was, but she continued to come to meetings and made a…

I am currently leading courses on Buddhist psychology here in Seoul, Korea, but as I am putting the course onto this site as we go along, members of La Ville au Roi (Eleusis) are also responding so it is a bit as though the course is going on in several countries at the same time which is nice.

For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was…